It was in relation to his fellow-stowaway that Alick showed the
best, or perhaps I should say the only good, points of his nature.
'Mind you,' he said suddenly, changing his tone, 'mind you that's a
good boy.  He wouldn't tell you a lie.  A lot of them think he is a
scamp because his clothes are ragged, but he isn't; he's as good as
gold.'  To hear him, you become aware that Alick himself had a
taste for virtue.  He thought his own idleness and the other's
industry equally becoming.  He was no more anxious to insure his
own reputation as a liar than to uphold the truthfulness of his
companion; and he seemed unaware of what was incongruous in his
attitude, and was plainly sincere in both characters.

It was not surprising that he should take an interest in the
Devonian, for the lad worshipped and served him in love and wonder.
Busy as he was, he would find time to warn Alick of an approaching
officer, or even to tell him that the coast was clear, and he might
slip off and smoke a pipe in safety.  'Tom,' he once said to him,
for that was the name which Alick ordered him to use, 'if you don't
like going to the galley, I'll go for you.  You ain't used to this
kind of thing, you ain't.  But I'm a sailor; and I can understand
the feelings of any fellow, I can.'  Again, he was hard up, and
casting about for some tobacco, for he was not so liberally used in
this respect as others perhaps less worthy, when Alick offered him
the half of one of his fifteen sticks.  I think, for my part, he
might have increased the offer to a whole one, or perhaps a pair of
them, and not lived to regret his liberality.  But the Devonian
refused.  'No,' he said, 'you're a stowaway like me; I won't take
it from you, I'll take it from some one who's not down on his
luck.'

It was notable in this generous lad that he was strongly under the
influence of sex.  If a woman passed near where he was working, his
eyes lit up, his hand paused, and his mind wandered instantly to
other thoughts.  It was natural that he should exercise a
fascination proportionally strong upon women.  He begged, you will
remember, from women only, and was never refused.  Without wishing
to explain away the charity of those who helped him, I cannot but
fancy he may have owed a little to his handsome face, and to that
quick, responsive nature, formed for love, which speaks eloquently
through all disguises, and can stamp an impression in ten minutes'
talk or an exchange of glances.  He was the more dangerous in that
he was far from bold, but seemed to woo in spite of himself, and
with a soft and pleading eye.  Ragged as he was, and many a
scarecrow is in that respect more comfortably furnished, even on
board he was not without some curious admirers.

There was a girl among the passengers, a tall, blonde, handsome,
strapping Irishwoman, with a wild, accommodating eye, whom Alick
had dubbed Tommy, with that transcendental appropriateness that
defies analysis.  One day the Devonian was lying for warmth in the
upper stoke-hole, which stands open on the deck, when Irish Tommy
came past, very neatly attired, as was her custom.

'Poor fellow,' she said, stopping, 'you haven't a vest.'

'No,' he said; 'I wish I 'ad.'

Then she stood and gazed on him in silence, until, in his
embarrassment, for he knew not how to look under this scrutiny, he
pulled out his pipe and began to fill it with tobacco.

'Do you want a match?' she asked.  And before he had time to reply,
she ran off and presently returned with more than one.

That was the beginning and the end, as far as our passage is
concerned, of what I will make bold to call this love-affair.
There are many relations which go on to marriage and last during a
lifetime, in which less human feeling is engaged than in this scene
of five minutes at the stoke-hole.

Rigidly speaking, this would end the chapter of the stowaways; but
in a larger sense of the word I have yet more to add.  Jones had
discovered and pointed out to me a young woman who was remarkable
among her fellows for a pleasing and interesting air.  She was
poorly clad, to the verge, if not over the line, of
disrespectability, with a ragged old jacket and a bit of a sealskin
cap no bigger than your fist; but her eyes, her whole expression,
and her manner, even in ordinary moments, told of a true womanly
nature, capable of love, anger, and devotion.  She had a look, too,
of refinement, like one who might have been a better lady than
most, had she been allowed the opportunity.  When alone she seemed
preoccupied and sad; but she was not often alone; there was usually
by her side a heavy, dull, gross man in rough clothes, chary of
speech and gesture--not from caution, but poverty of disposition; a
man like a ditcher, unlovely and uninteresting; whom she petted and
tended and waited on with her eyes as if he had been Amadis of
Gaul.  It was strange to see this hulking fellow dog-sick, and this
delicate, sad woman caring for him.  He seemed, from first to last,
insensible of her caresses and attentions, and she seemed
unconscious of his insensibility.  The Irish husband, who sang his
wife to sleep, and this Scottish girl serving her Orson, were the
two bits of human nature that most appealed to me throughout the
voyage.

On the Thursday before we arrived, the tickets were collected; and
soon a rumour began to go round the vessel; and this girl, with her
bit of sealskin cap, became the centre of whispering and pointed
fingers.  She also, it was said, was a stowaway of a sort; for she
was on board with neither ticket nor money; and the man with whom
she travelled was the father of a family, who had left wife and
children to be hers.  The ship's officers discouraged the story,
which may therefore have been a story and no more; but it was
believed in the steerage, and the poor girl had to encounter many
curious eyes from that day forth.


PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND REVIEW


Travel is of two kinds; and this voyage of mine across the ocean
combined both.  'Out of my country and myself I go,' sings the old
poet:  and I was not only travelling out of my country in latitude
and longitude, but out of myself in diet, associates, and
consideration.  Part of the interest and a great deal of the
amusement flowed, at least to me, from this novel situation in the
world.

I found that I had what they call fallen in life with absolute
success and verisimilitude.  I was taken for a steerage passenger;
no one seemed surprised that I should be so; and there was nothing
but the brass plate between decks to remind me that I had once been
a gentleman.  In a former book, describing a former journey, I
expressed some wonder that I could be readily and naturally taken
for a pedlar, and explained the accident by the difference of
language and manners between England and France.  I must now take a
humbler view; for here I was among my own countrymen, somewhat
roughly clad to be sure, but with every advantage of speech and
manner; and I am bound to confess that I passed for nearly anything
you please except an educated gentleman.  The sailors called me
'mate,' the officers addressed me as 'my man,' my comrades accepted
me without hesitation for a person of their own character and
experience, but with some curious information.  One, a mason
himself, believed I was a mason; several, and among these at least
one of the seaman, judged me to be a petty officer in the American
navy; and I was so often set down for a practical engineer that at
last I had not the heart to deny it.  From all these guesses I drew
one conclusion, which told against the insight of my companions.
They might be close observers in their own way, and read the
manners in the face; but it was plain that they did not extend
their observation to the hands.

To the saloon passengers also I sustained my part without a hitch.
It is true I came little in their way; but when we did encounter,
there was no recognition in their eye, although I confess I
sometimes courted it in silence.  All these, my inferiors and
equals, took me, like the transformed monarch in the story, for a
mere common, human man.  They gave me a hard, dead look, with the
flesh about the eye kept unrelaxed.

With the women this surprised me less, as I had already
experimented on the sex by going abroad through a suburban part of
London simply attired in a sleeve-waistcoat.  The result was
curious.  I then learned for the first time, and by the exhaustive
process, how much attention ladies are accustomed to bestow on all
male creatures of their own station; for, in my humble rig, each
one who went by me caused me a certain shock of surprise and a
sense of something wanting.  In my normal circumstances, it
appeared every young lady must have paid me some tribute of a
glance; and though I had often not detected it when it was given, I
was well aware of its absence when it was withheld.  My height
seemed to decrease with every woman who passed me, for she passed
me like a dog.  This is one of my grounds for supposing that what
are called the upper classes may sometimes produce a disagreeable
impression in what are called the lower; and I wish some one would
continue my experiment, and find out exactly at what stage of
toilette a man becomes invisible to the well-regulated female eye.

Here on shipboard the matter was put to a more complete test; for,
even with the addition of speech and manner, I passed among the
ladies for precisely the average man of the steerage.  It was one
afternoon that I saw this demonstrated.  A very plainly dressed
woman was taken ill on deck.  I think I had the luck to be present
at every sudden seizure during all the passage; and on this
occasion found myself in the place of importance, supporting the
sufferer.  There was not only a large crowd immediately around us,
but a considerable knot of saloon passengers leaning over our heads
from the hurricane-deck.  One of these, an elderly managing woman,
hailed me with counsels.  Of course I had to reply; and as the talk
went on, I began to discover that the whole group took me for the
husband.  I looked upon my new wife, poor creature, with mingled
feelings; and I must own she had not even the appearance of the
poorest class of city servant-maids, but looked more like a country
wench who should have been employed at a roadside inn.  Now was the
time for me to go and study the brass plate.

To such of the officers as knew about me--the doctor, the purser,
and the stewards--I appeared in the light of a broad joke.  The
fact that I spent the better part of my day in writing had gone
abroad over the ship and tickled them all prodigiously.  Whenever
they met me they referred to my absurd occupation with familiarity
and breadth of humorous intention.  Their manner was well
calculated to remind me of my fallen fortunes.  You may be
sincerely amused by the amateur literary efforts of a gentleman,
but you scarce publish the feeling to his face. 'Well!' they would
say:  'still writing?'  And the smile would widen into a laugh.
The purser came one day into the cabin, and, touched to the heart
by my misguided industry, offered me some other kind of writing,
'for which,' he added pointedly, 'you will be paid.'  This was
nothing else than to copy out the list of passengers.

Another trick of mine which told against my reputation was my
choice of roosting-place in an active draught upon the cabin floor.
I was openly jeered and flouted for this eccentricity; and a
considerable knot would sometimes gather at the door to see my last
dispositions for the night.  This was embarrassing, but I learned
to support the trial with equanimity.

Indeed I may say that, upon the whole, my new position sat lightly
and naturally upon my spirits.  I accepted the consequences with
readiness, and found them far from difficult to bear.  The steerage
conquered me; I conformed more and more to the type of the place,
not only in manner but at heart, growing hostile to the officers
and cabin passengers who looked down upon me, and day by day
greedier for small delicacies.  Such was the result, as I fancy, of
a diet of bread and butter, soup and porridge.  We think we have no
sweet tooth as long as we are full to the brim of molasses; but a
man must have sojourned in the workhouse before he boasts himself
indifferent to dainties.  Every evening, for instance, I was more
and more preoccupied about our doubtful fare at tea.  If it was
delicate my heart was much lightened; if it was but broken fish I
was proportionally downcast.  The offer of a little jelly from a
fellow-passenger more provident than myself caused a marked
elevation in my spirits.  And I would have gone to the ship's end
and back again for an oyster or a chipped fruit.

In other ways I was content with my position.  It seemed no
disgrace to be confounded with my company; for I may as well
declare at once I found their manners as gentle and becoming as
those of any other class.  I do not mean that my friends could have
sat down without embarrassment and laughable disaster at the table
of a duke.  That does not imply an inferiority of breeding, but a
difference of usage.  Thus I flatter myself that I conducted myself
well among my fellow-passengers; yet my most ambitious hope is not
to have avoided faults, but to have committed as few as possible.
I know too well that my tact is not the same as their tact, and
that my habit of a different society constituted, not only no
qualification, but a positive disability to move easily and
becomingly in this.  When Jones complimented me--because I 'managed
to behave very pleasantly' to my fellow-passengers, was how he put
it--I could follow the thought in his mind, and knew his compliment
to be such as we pay foreigners on their proficiency in English.  I
dare say this praise was given me immediately on the back of some
unpardonable solecism, which had led him to review my conduct as a
whole.  We are all ready to laugh at the ploughman among lords; we
should consider also the case of a lord among the ploughmen.  I
have seen a lawyer in the house of a Hebridean fisherman; and I
know, but nothing will induce me to disclose, which of these two
was the better gentleman.  Some of our finest behaviour, though it
looks well enough from the boxes, may seem even brutal to the
gallery.  We boast too often manners that are parochial rather than
universal; that, like a country wine, will not bear transportation
for a hundred miles, nor from the parlour to the kitchen.  To be a
gentleman is to be one all the world over, and in every relation
and grade of society.  It is a high calling, to which a man must
first be born, and then devote himself for life.  And, unhappily,
the manners of a certain so-called upper grade have a kind of
currency, and meet with a certain external acceptation throughout
all the others, and this tends to keep us well satisfied with
slight acquirements and the amateurish accomplishments of a clique.
But manners, like art, should be human and central.

Some of my fellow-passengers, as I now moved among them in a
relation of equality, seemed to me excellent gentlemen.  They were
not rough, nor hasty, nor disputatious; debated pleasantly,
differed kindly; were helpful, gentle, patient, and placid.  The
type of manners was plain, and even heavy; there was little to
please the eye, but nothing to shock; and I thought gentleness lay
more nearly at the spring of behaviour than in many more ornate and
delicate societies.  I say delicate, where I cannot say refined; a
thing may be fine, like ironwork, without being delicate, like
lace.  There was here less delicacy; the skin supported more
callously the natural surface of events, the mind received more
bravely the crude facts of human existence; but I do not think that
there was less effective refinement, less consideration for others,
less polite suppression of self.  I speak of the best among my
fellow-passengers; for in the steerage, as well as in the saloon,
there is a mixture.  Those, then, with whom I found myself in
sympathy, and of whom I may therefore hope to write with a greater
measure of truth, were not only as good in their manners, but
endowed with very much the same natural capacities, and about as
wise in deduction, as the bankers and barristers of what is called
society.  One and all were too much interested in disconnected
facts, and loved information for its own sake with too rash a
devotion; but people in all classes display the same appetite as
they gorge themselves daily with the miscellaneous gossip of the
newspaper.  Newspaper-reading, as far as I can make out, is often
rather a sort of brown study than an act of culture.  I have myself
palmed off yesterday's issue on a friend, and seen him re-peruse it
for a continuance of minutes with an air at once refreshed and
solemn.  Workmen, perhaps, pay more attention; but though they may
be eager listeners, they have rarely seemed to me either willing or
careful thinkers.  Culture is not measured by the greatness of the
field which is covered by our knowledge, but by the nicety with
which we can perceive relations in that field, whether great or
small.  Workmen, certainly those who were on board with me, I found
wanting in this quality or habit of the mind.  They did not
perceive relations, but leaped to a so-called cause, and thought
the problem settled.  Thus the cause of everything in England was
the form of government, and the cure for all evils was, by
consequence, a revolution.  It is surprising how many of them said
this, and that none should have had a definite thought in his head
as he said it.  Some hated the Church because they disagreed with
it; some hated Lord Beaconsfield because of war and taxes; all
hated the masters, possibly with reason.  But these failings were
not at the root of the matter; the true reasoning of their souls
ran thus--I have not got on; I ought to have got on; if there was a
revolution I should get on.  How?  They had no idea.  Why?
Because--because--well, look at America!

To be politically blind is no distinction; we are all so, if you
come to that.  At bottom, as it seems to me, there is but one
question in modern home politics, though it appears in many shapes,
and that is the question of money; and but one political remedy,
that the people should grow wiser and better.  My workmen fellow-
passengers were as impatient and dull of hearing on the second of
these points as any member of Parliament; but they had some
glimmerings of the first.  They would not hear of improvement on
their part, but wished the world made over again in a crack, so
that they might remain improvident and idle and debauched, and yet
enjoy the comfort and respect that should accompany the opposite
virtues; and it was in this expectation, as far as I could see,
that many of them were now on their way to America.  But on the
point of money they saw clearly enough that inland politics, so far
as they were concerned, were reducible to the question of annual
income; a question which should long ago have been settled by a
revolution, they did not know how, and which they were now about to
settle for themselves, once more they knew not how, by crossing the
Atlantic in a steamship of considerable tonnage.

And yet it has been amply shown them that the second or income
question is in itself nothing, and may as well be left undecided,
if there be no wisdom and virtue to profit by the change.  It is
not by a man's purse, but by his character that he is rich or poor.
Barney will be poor, Alick will be poor, Mackay will be poor; let
them go where they will, and wreck all the governments under
heaven, they will be poor until they die.

Nothing is perhaps more notable in the average workman than his
surprising idleness, and the candour with which he confesses to the
failing.  It has to me been always something of a relief to find
the poor, as a general rule, so little oppressed with work.  I can
in consequence enjoy my own more fortunate beginning with a better
grace.  The other day I was living with a farmer in America, an old
frontiersman, who had worked and fought, hunted and farmed, from
his childhood up.  He excused himself for his defective education
on the ground that he had been overworked from first to last.  Even
now, he said, anxious as he was, he had never the time to take up a
book.  In consequence of this, I observed him closely; he was
occupied for four or, at the extreme outside, for five hours out of
the twenty-four, and then principally in walking; and the remainder
of the day he passed in born idleness, either eating fruit or
standing with his back against a door.  I have known men do hard
literary work all morning, and then undergo quite as much physical
fatigue by way of relief as satisfied this powerful frontiersman
for the day.  He, at least, like all the educated class, did so
much homage to industry as to persuade himself he was industrious.
But the average mechanic recognises his idleness with effrontery;
he has even, as I am told, organised it.

I give the story as it was told me, and it was told me for a fact.
A man fell from a housetop in the city of Aberdeen, and was brought
into hospital with broken bones.  He was asked what was his trade,
and replied that he was a TAPPER.  No one had ever heard of such a
thing before; the officials were filled with curiosity; they
besought an explanation.  It appeared that when a party of slaters
were engaged upon a roof, they would now and then be taken with a
fancy for the public-house.  Now a seamstress, for example, might
slip away from her work and no one be the wiser; but if these
fellows adjourned, the tapping of the mallets would cease, and thus
the neighbourhood be advertised of their defection.  Hence the
career of the tapper.  He has to do the tapping and keep up an
industrious bustle on the housetop during the absence of the
slaters.  When he taps for only one or two the thing is child's-
play, but when he has to represent a whole troop, it is then that
he earns his money in the sweat of his brow.  Then must he bound
from spot to spot, reduplicate, triplicate, sexduplicate his single
personality, and swell and hasten his blows., until he produce a
perfect illusion for the ear, and you would swear that a crowd of
emulous masons were continuing merrily to roof the house.  It must
be a strange sight from an upper window.

I heard nothing on board of the tapper; but I was astonished at the
stories told by my companions.  Skulking, shirking, malingering,
were all established tactics, it appeared.  They could see no
dishonesty where a man who is paid for an bones work gives half an
hour's consistent idling in its place.  Thus the tapper would
refuse to watch for the police during a burglary, and call himself
a honest man.  It is not sufficiently recognised that our race
detests to work.  If I thought that I should have to work every day
of my life as hard as I am working now, I should be tempted to give
up the struggle.  And the workman early begins on his career of
toil.  He has never had his fill of holidays in the past, and his
prospect of holidays in the future is both distant and uncertain.
In the circumstances, it would require a high degree of virtue not
to snatch alleviations for the moment.

There were many good talkers on the ship; and I believe good
talking of a certain sort is a common accomplishment among working
men.  Where books are comparatively scarce, a greater amount of
information will be given and received by word of mouth; and this
tends to produce good talkers, and, what is no less needful for
conversation, good listeners.  They could all tell a story with
effect.  I am sometimes tempted to think that the less literary
class show always better in narration; they have so much more
patience with detail, are so much less hurried to reach the points,
and preserve so much juster a proportion among the facts.  At the
same time their talk is dry; they pursue a topic ploddingly, have
not an agile fancy, do not throw sudden lights from unexpected
quarters, and when the talk is over they often leave the matter
where it was.  They mark time instead of marching.  They think only
to argue, not to reach new conclusions, and use their reason rather
as a weapon of offense than as a tool for self-improvement.  Hence
the talk of some of the cleverest was unprofitable in result,
because there was no give and take; they would grant you as little
as possible for premise, and begin to dispute under an oath to
conquer or to die.

But the talk of a workman is apt to be more interesting than that
of a wealthy merchant, because the thoughts, hopes, and fears of
which the workman's life is built lie nearer to necessity and
nature.  They are more immediate to human life.  An income
calculated by the week is a far more human thing than one
calculated by the year, and a small income, simply from its
smallness, than a large one.  I never wearied listening to the
details of a workman's economy, because every item stood for some
real pleasure.  If he could afford pudding twice a week, you know
that twice a week the man ate with genuine gusto and was physically
happy; while if you learn that a rich man has seven courses a day,
ten to one the half of them remain untasted, and the whole is but
misspent money and a weariness to the flesh.

The difference between England and America to a working man was
thus most humanly put to me by a fellow-passenger:  'In America,'
said he, 'you get pies and puddings.'  I do not hear enough, in
economy books, of pies and pudding.  A man lives in and for the
delicacies, adornments, and accidental attributes of life, such as
pudding to eat and pleasant books and theatres to occupy his
leisure.  The bare terms of existence would be rejected with
contempt by all.  If a man feeds on bread and butter, soup and
porridge, his appetite grows wolfish after dainties.  And the
workman dwells in a borderland, and is always within sight of those
cheerless regions where life is more difficult to sustain than
worth sustaining.  Every detail of our existence, where it is worth
while to cross the ocean after pie and pudding, is made alive and
enthralling by the presence of genuine desire; but it is all one to
me whether Croesus has a hundred or a thousand thousands in the
bank.  There is more adventure in the life of the working man who
descends as a common solder into the battle of life, than in that
of the millionaire who sits apart in an office, like Von Moltke,
and only directs the manoeuvres by telegraph.  Give me to hear
about the career of him who is in the thick of business; to whom
one change of market means empty belly, and another a copious and
savoury meal.  This is not the philosophical, but the human side of
economics; it interests like a story; and the life all who are thus
situated partakes in a small way the charm of Robinson Crusoe; for
every step is critical and human life is presented to you naked and
verging to its lowest terms.


NEW YORK


As we drew near to New York I was at first amused, and then
somewhat staggered, by the cautious and the grisly tales that went
the round.  You would have thought we were to land upon a cannibal
island.  You must speak to no one in the streets, as they would not
leave you till you were rooked and beaten.  You must enter a hotel
with military precautions; for the least you had to apprehend was
to awake next morning without money or baggage, or necessary
raiment, a lone forked radish in a bed; and if the worst befell,
you would instantly and mysteriously disappear from the ranks of
mankind.

I have usually found such stories correspond to the least modicum
of fact.  Thus I was warned, I remember, against the roadside inns
of the Cevennes, and that by a learned professor; and when I
reached Pradelles the warning was explained--it was but the far-
away rumour and reduplication of a single terrifying story already
half a century old, and half forgotten in the theatre of the
events.  So I was tempted to make light of these reports against
America.  But we had on board with us a man whose evidence it would
not do to put aside.  He had come near these perils in the body; he
had visited a robber inn.  The public has an old and well-grounded
favour for this class of incident, and shall be gratified to the
best of my power.

My fellow-passenger, whom we shall call M'Naughten, had come from
New York to Boston with a comrade, seeking work.  They were a pair
of rattling blades; and, leaving their baggage at the station,
passed the day in beer saloons, and with congenial spirits, until
midnight struck.  Then they applied themselves to find a lodging,
and walked the streets till two, knocking at houses of
entertainment and being refused admittance, or themselves declining
the terms.  By two the inspiration of their liquor had begun to
wear off; they were weary and humble, and after a great circuit
found themselves in the same street where they had begun their
search, and in front of a French hotel where they had already
sought accommodation.  Seeing the house still open, they returned
to the charge.  A man in a white cap sat in an office by the door.
He seemed to welcome them more warmly than when they had first
presented themselves, and the charge for the night had somewhat
unaccountably fallen from a dollar to a quarter.  They thought him
ill-looking, but paid their quarter apiece, and were shown upstairs
to the top of the house.  There, in a small room, the man in the
white cap wished them pleasant slumbers.

It was furnished with a bed, a chair, and some conveniences.  The
door did not lock on the inside; and the only sign of adornment was
a couple of framed pictures, one close above the head of the bed,
and the other opposite the foot, and both curtained, as we may
sometimes see valuable water-colours, or the portraits of the dead,
or works of art more than usually skittish in the subject.  It was
perhaps in the hope of finding something of this last description
that M'Naughten's comrade pulled aside the curtain of the first.
He was startlingly disappointed.  There was no picture.  The frame
surrounded, and the curtain was designed to hide, an oblong
aperture in the partition, through which they looked forth into the
dark corridor.  A person standing without could easily take a purse
from under the pillow, or even strangle a sleeper as he lay abed.
M'Naughten and his comrade stared at each other like Vasco's
seamen, 'with a wild surmise'; and then the latter, catching up the
lamp, ran to the other frame and roughly raised the curtain.  There
he stood, petrified; and M'Naughten, who had followed, grasped him
by the wrist in terror.  They could see into another room, larger
in size than that which they occupied, where three men sat
crouching and silent in the dark.  For a second or so these five
persons looked each other in the eyes, then the curtain was
dropped, and M'Naughten and his friend made but one bolt of it out
of the room and downstairs.  The man in the white cap said nothing
as they passed him; and they were so pleased to be once more in the
open night that they gave up all notion of a bed, and walked the
streets of Boston till the morning.

No one seemed much cast down by these stories, but all inquired
after the address of a respectable hotel; and I, for my part, put
myself under the conduct of Mr. Jones.  Before noon of the second
Sunday we sighted the low shores outside of New York harbour; the
steerage passengers must remain on board to pass through Castle
Garden on the following morning; but we of the second cabin made
our escape along with the lords of the saloon; and by six o'clock
Jones and I issued into West Street, sitting on some straw in the
bottom of an open baggage-wagon.  It rained miraculously; and from
that moment till on the following night I left New York, there was
scarce a lull, and no cessation of the downpour.  The roadways were
flooded; a loud strident noise of falling water filled the air; the
restaurants smelt heavily of wet people and wet clothing.

It took us but a few minutes, though it cost us a good deal of
money, to be rattled along West Street to our destination:
'Reunion House, No. 10 West Street, one minutes walk from Castle
Garden; convenient to Castle Garden, the Steamboat Landings,
California Steamers and Liverpool Ships; Board and Lodging per day
1 dollar, single meals 25 cents, lodging per night 25 cents;
private rooms for families; no charge for storage or baggage;
satisfaction guaranteed to all persons; Michael Mitchell,
Proprietor.'  Reunion House was, I may go the length of saying, a
humble hostelry.  You entered through a long bar-room, thence
passed into a little dining-room, and thence into a still smaller
kitchen.  The furniture was of the plainest; but the bar was hung
in the American taste, with encouraging and hospitable mottoes.

Jones was well known; we were received warmly; and two minutes
afterwards I had refused a drink from the proprietor, and was going
on, in my plain European fashion, to refuse a cigar, when Mr.
Mitchell sternly interposed, and explained the situation.  He was
offering to treat me, it appeared, whenever an American bar-keeper
proposes anything, it must be borne in mind that he is offering to
treat; and if I did not want a drink, I must at least take the
cigar.  I took it bashfully, feeling I had begun my American career
on the wrong foot.  I did not enjoy that cigar; but this may have
been from a variety of reasons, even the best cigar often failing
to please if you smoke three-quarters of it in a drenching rain.

For many years America was to me a sort of promised land; 'westward
the march of empire holds its way'; the race is for the moment to
the young; what has been and what is we imperfectly and obscurely
know; what is to be yet lies beyond the flight of our imaginations.
Greece, Rome, and Judaea are gone by forever, leaving to
generations the legacy of their accomplished work; China still
endures, an old-inhabited house in the brand-new city of nations;
England has already declined, since she has lost the States; and to
these States, therefore, yet undeveloped, full of dark
possibilities, and grown, like another Eve, from one rib out of the
side of their own old land, the minds of young men in England turn
naturally at a certain hopeful period of their age.  It will be
hard for an American to understand the spirit.  But let him imagine
a young man, who shall have grown up in an old and rigid circle,
following bygone fashions and taught to distrust his own fresh
instincts, and who now suddenly hears of a family of cousins, all
about his own age, who keep house together by themselves and live
far from restraint and tradition; let him imagine this, and he will
have some imperfect notion of the sentiment with which spirited
English youths turn to the thought of the American Republic.  It
seems to them as if, out west, the war of life was still conducted
in the open air, and on free barbaric terms; as if it had not yet
been narrowed into parlours, nor begun to be conducted, like some
unjust and dreary arbitration, by compromise, costume forms of
procedure, and sad, senseless self-denial.  Which of these two he
prefers, a man with any youth still left in him will decide rightly
for himself.  He would rather be houseless than denied a pass-key;
rather go without food than partake of stalled ox in stiff,
respectable society; rather be shot out of hand than direct his
life according to the dictates of the world.

He knows or thinks nothing of the Maine Laws, the Puritan sourness,
the fierce, sordid appetite for dollars, or the dreary existence of
country towns.  A few wild story-books which delighted his
childhood form the imaginative basis of his picture of America.  In
course of time, there is added to this a great crowd of stimulating
details--vast cities that grow up as by enchantment; the birds,
that have gone south in autumn, returning with the spring to find
thousands camped upon their marshes, and the lamps burning far and
near along populous streets; forests that disappear like snow;
countries larger than Britain that are cleared and settled, one man
running forth with his household gods before another, while the
bear and the Indian are yet scarce aware of their approach; oil
that gushes from the earth; gold that is washed or quarried in the
brooks or glens of the Sierras; and all that bustle, courage,
action, and constant kaleidoscopic change that Walt Whitman has
seized and set forth in his vigorous, cheerful, and loquacious
verses.

Here I was at last in America, and was soon out upon New York
streets, spying for things foreign.  The place had to me an air of
Liverpool; but such was the rain that not Paradise itself would
have looked inviting.  We were a party of four, under two
umbrellas; Jones and I and two Scots lads, recent immigrants, and
not indisposed to welcome a compatriot.  They had been six weeks in
New York, and neither of them had yet found a single job or earned
a single halfpenny.  Up to the present they were exactly out of
pocket by the amount of the fare.

The lads soon left us.  Now I had sworn by all my gods to have such
a dinner as would rouse the dead; there was scarce any expense at
which I should have hesitated; the devil was in it, but Jones and I
should dine like heathen emperors.  I set to work, asking after a
restaurant; and I chose the wealthiest and most gastronomical-
looking passers-by to ask from.  Yet, although I had told them I
was willing to pay anything in reason, one and all sent me off to
cheap, fixed-price houses, where I would not have eaten that night
for the cost of twenty dinners.  I do not know if this were
characteristic of New York, or whether it was only Jones and I who
looked un-dinerly and discouraged enterprising suggestions.  But at
length, by our own sagacity, we found a French restaurant, where
there was a French waiter, some fair French cooking, some so-called
French wine, and French coffee to conclude the whole.  I never
entered into the feelings of Jack on land so completely as when I
tasted that coffee.

I suppose we had one of the 'private rooms for families' at Reunion
House.  It was very small, furnished with a bed, a chair, and some
clothes-pegs; and it derived all that was necessary for the life of
the human animal through two borrowed lights; one looking into the
passage, and the second opening, without sash, into another
apartment, where three men fitfully snored, or in intervals of
wakefulness, drearily mumbled to each other all night long.  It
will be observed that this was almost exactly the disposition of
the room in M'Naughten's story.  Jones had the bed; I pitched my
camp upon the floor; he did not sleep until near morning, and I,
for my part, never closed an eye.

At sunrise I heard a cannon fired; and shortly afterwards the men
in the next room gave over snoring for good, and began to rustle
over their toilettes.  The sound of their voices as they talked was
low and like that of people watching by the sick.  Jones, who had
at last begun to doze, tumbled and murmured, and every now and then
opened unconscious eyes upon me where I lay.  I found myself
growing eerier and eerier, for I dare say I was a little fevered by
my restless night, and hurried to dress and get downstairs.

You had to pass through the rain, which still fell thick and
resonant, to reach a lavatory on the other side of the court.
There were three basin-stands, and a few crumpled towels and pieces
of wet soap, white and slippery like fish; nor should I forget a
looking-glass and a pair of questionable combs.  Another Scots lad
was here, scrubbing his face with a good will.  He had been three
months in New York and had not yet found a single job nor earned a
single halfpenny.  Up to the present, he also was exactly out of
pocket by the amount of the fare.  I began to grow sick at heart
for my fellow-emigrants.

Of my nightmare wanderings in New York I spare to tell.  I had a
thousand and one things to do; only the day to do them in, and a
journey across the continent before me in the evening.  It rained
with patient fury; every now and then I had to get under cover for
a while in order, so to speak, to give my mackintosh a rest; for
under this continued drenching it began to grow damp on the inside.
I went to banks, post-offices, railway-offices, restaurants,
publishers, booksellers, money-changers, and wherever I went a pool
would gather about my feet, and those who were careful of their
floors would look on with an unfriendly eye.  Wherever I went, too,
the same traits struck me:  the people were all surprisingly rude
and surprisingly kind.  The money-changer cross-questioned me like
a French commissary, asking my age, my business, my average income,
and my destination, beating down my attempts at evasion, and
receiving my answers in silence; and yet when all was over, he
shook hands with me up to the elbows, and sent his lad nearly a
quarter of a mile in the rain to get me books at a reduction.
Again, in a very large publishing and bookselling establishment, a
man, who seemed to be the manager, received me as I had certainly
never before been received in any human shop, indicated squarely
that he put no faith in my honesty, and refused to look up the
names of books or give me the slightest help or information, on the
ground, like the steward, that it was none of his business.  I lost
my temper at last, said I was a stranger in America and not learned
in their etiquette; but I would assure him, if he went to any
bookseller in England, of more handsome usage.  The boast was
perhaps exaggerated; but like many a long shot, it struck the gold.
The manager passed at once from one extreme to the other; I may say
that from that moment he loaded me with kindness; he gave me all
sorts of good advice, wrote me down addresses, and came bareheaded
into the rain to point me out a restaurant, where I might lunch,
nor even then did he seem to think that he had done enough.  These
are (it is as well to be bold in statement) the manners of America.
It is this same opposition that has most struck me in people of
almost all classes and from east to west.  By the time a man had
about strung me up to be the death of him by his insulting
behaviour, he himself would be just upon the point of melting into
confidence and serviceable attentions.  Yet I suspect, although I
have met with the like in so many parts, that this must be the
character of some particular state or group of states, for in
America, and this again in all classes, you will find some of the
softest-mannered gentlemen in the world.

I was so wet when I got back to Mitchell's toward the evening, that
I had simply to divest myself of my shoes, socks, and trousers, and
leave them behind for the benefit of New York city.  No fire could
have dried them ere I had to start; and to pack them in their
present condition was to spread ruin among my other possessions.
With a heavy heart I said farewell to them as they lay a pulp in
the middle of a pool upon the floor of Mitchell's kitchen.  I
wonder if they are dry by now.  Mitchell hired a man to carry my
baggage to the station, which was hard by, accompanied me thither
himself, and recommended me to the particular attention of the
officials.  No one could have been kinder.  Those who are out of
pocket may go safely to Reunion House, where they will get decent
meals and find an honest and obliging landlord.  I owed him this
word of thanks, before I enter fairly on the second {1} and far
less agreeable chapter of my emigrant experience.



CHAPTER II--COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK--A FRAGMENT--1871



Very much as a painter half closes his eyes so that some salient
unity may disengage itself from among the crowd of details, and
what he sees may thus form itself into a whole; very much on the
same principle, I may say, I allow a considerable lapse of time to
intervene between any of my little journeyings and the attempt to
chronicle them.  I cannot describe a thing that is before me at the
moment, or that has been before me only a very little while before;
I must allow my recollections to get thoroughly strained free from
all chaff till nothing be except the pure gold; allow my memory to
choose out what is truly memorable by a process of natural
selection; and I piously believe that in this way I ensure the
Survival of the Fittest.  If I make notes for future use, or if I
am obliged to write letters during the course of my little
excursion, I so interfere with the process that I can never again
find out what is worthy of being preserved, or what should be given
in full length, what in torso, or what merely in profile.  This
process of incubation may be unreasonably prolonged; and I am
somewhat afraid that I have made this mistake with the present
journey.  Like a bad daguerreotype, great part of it has been
entirely lost; I can tell you nothing about the beginning and
nothing about the end; but the doings of some fifty or sixty hours
about the middle remain quite distinct and definite, like a little
patch of sunshine on a long, shadowy plain, or the one spot on an
old picture that has been restored by the dexterous hand of the
cleaner.  I remember a tale of an old Scots minister called upon
suddenly to preach, who had hastily snatched an old sermon out of
his study and found himself in the pulpit before he noticed that
the rats had been making free with his manuscript and eaten the
first two or three pages away; he gravely explained to the
congregation how he found himself situated:  'And now,' said he,
'let us just begin where the rats have left off.'  I must follow
the divine's example, and take up the thread of my discourse where
it first distinctly issues from the limbo of forgetfulness.


COCKERMOUTH


I was lighting my pipe as I stepped out of the inn at Cockermouth,
and did not raise my head until I was fairly in the street.  When I
did so, it flashed upon me that I was in England; the evening
sunlight lit up English houses, English faces, an English
conformation of street,--as it were, an English atmosphere blew
against my face.  There is nothing perhaps more puzzling (if one
thing in sociology can ever really be more unaccountable than
another) than the great gulf that is set between England and
Scotland--a gulf so easy in appearance, in reality so difficult to
traverse.  Here are two people almost identical in blood; pent up
together on one small island, so that their intercourse (one would
have thought) must be as close as that of prisoners who shared one
cell of the Bastille; the same in language and religion; and yet a
few years of quarrelsome isolation--a mere forenoon's tiff, as one
may call it, in comparison with the great historical cycles--has so
separated their thoughts and ways that not unions, not mutual
dangers, nor steamers, nor railways, nor all the king's horses and
all the king's men, seem able to obliterate the broad distinction.
In the trituration of another century or so the corners may
disappear; but in the meantime, in the year of grace 1871, I was as
much in a new country as if I had been walking out of the Hotel St.
Antoine at Antwerp.

I felt a little thrill of pleasure at my heart as I realised the
change, and strolled away up the street with my hands behind my
back, noting in a dull, sensual way how foreign, and yet how
friendly, were the slopes of the gables and the colour of the
tiles, and even the demeanour and voices of the gossips round about
me.

Wandering in this aimless humour, I turned up a lane and found
myself following the course of the bright little river.  I passed
first one and then another, then a third, several couples out love-
making in the spring evening; and a consequent feeling of
loneliness was beginning to grow upon me, when I came to a dam
across the river, and a mill--a great, gaunt promontory of
building,--half on dry ground and half arched over the stream.  The
road here drew in its shoulders and crept through between the
landward extremity of the mill and a little garden enclosure, with
a small house and a large signboard within its privet hedge.  I was
pleased to fancy this an inn, and drew little etchings in fancy of
a sanded parlour, and three-cornered spittoons, and a society of
parochial gossips seated within over their churchwardens; but as I
drew near, the board displayed its superscription, and I could read
the name of Smethurst, and the designation of 'Canadian Felt Hat
Manufacturers.'  There was no more hope of evening fellowship, and
I could only stroll on by the river-side, under the trees.  The
water was dappled with slanting sunshine, and dusted all over with
a little mist of flying insects.  There were some amorous ducks,
also, whose lovemaking reminded me of what I had seen a little
farther down.  But the road grew sad, and I grew weary; and as I
was perpetually haunted with the terror of a return of the tie that
had been playing such ruin in my head a week ago, I turned and went
back to the inn, and supper, and my bed.

The next morning, at breakfast, I communicated to the smart
waitress my intention of continuing down the coast and through
Whitehaven to Furness, and, as I might have expected, I was
instantly confronted by that last and most worrying form of
interference, that chooses to introduce tradition and authority
into the choice of a man's own pleasures.  I can excuse a person
combating my religious or philosophical heresies, because them I
have deliberately accepted, and am ready to justify by present
argument.  But I do not seek to justify my pleasures.  If I prefer
tame scenery to grand, a little hot sunshine over lowland parks and
woodlands to the war of the elements round the summit of Mont
Blanc; or if I prefer a pipe of mild tobacco, and the company of
one or two chosen companions, to a ball where I feel myself very
hot, awkward, and weary, I merely state these preferences as facts,
and do not seek to establish them as principles.  This is not the
general rule, however, and accordingly the waitress was shocked, as
one might be at a heresy, to hear the route that I had sketched out
for myself.  Everybody who came to Cockermouth for pleasure, it
appeared, went on to Keswick.  It was in vain that I put up a
little plea for the liberty of the subject; it was in vain that I
said I should prefer to go to Whitehaven.  I was told that there
was 'nothing to see there'--that weary, hackneyed, old falsehood;
and at last, as the handmaiden began to look really concerned, I
gave way, as men always do in such circumstances, and agreed that I
was to leave for Keswick by a train in the early evening.